Thursday, December 21, 2017

Today, when the word “hourglass” is used, it’s more likely
to modify “figure” or “economy.” Yet, when I was a kid, we used to make fun of
a soap opera that claimed, “like sands through the hourglass, so are the days
of our lives.” But what does that mean exactly? I think they meant it like
“funny how time slips away,” as if turning it over means death? But, as a
time-measurer, the hourglass and the (electric, non-digital) clock both figure
time more as a circle than a line (even if you can’t turn back the hands of
time). The clock may be self-contained, but the hourglass needs something to
turn it over if the sands are to return to the other side, and while a clock is
thought of as measuring a day, in Krysia Jopek’s Hourglass Studies (Crisis Chronicles, 2017), the hourglass measures
the year (and maybe even “our lives”).

Many poets and writers have considered the analogy between
the day and the year (noon is like the summer solstice, midnight the winter
solstice, and evening an equinox), but viewing the seasonal cycles as the
primary scope rather than the diurnal cycle gives Jopek’s poetic sequence more
gravitas (it’s one thing to say “the darkest hour is just before the dawn” and
quite another to plead, “if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” or dream
of “second innocence” or “next time is the best time” as if it wouldn’t be
winter had you not made some dreadful error in summer):

“A clock points the exit
of bliss balanced with the least

severe
bitterness. To want so much and
turn over pliant grains

of sand without
meaning. (1)

The clock is active; the hourglass passive; time itself
seems absent. Is it the clock that wants to turn over the hourglass’s sands? Is
pointing out the exit the same as wanting so much? Is the hourglass more like
time itself than a clock is? What is time if not measured? What is time if
measured? Does the clock really start it? Like the unmoved mover, or the logos
that allegedly comes before the flesh (time)? Can measuring devices evoke the
unmeasurable?

For those who are looking for ‘speaker and situation’ to
ground this poem from these potentially infinite questions, one could this say
it takes place “in the month of winter solstice/ when the change is due to
come” (as Syd Barrett put it, setting the I-Ching to music), and, in this
sense, they provide an alternative ritual to navigate the month in which
American suicide rates are highest than the ready made pseudo-religious rituals
of secular Xmas. Of course, the winter solstice can be “a metaphor for” a
personal psychological journey, (“the illusion of starting over” 13), as if
this point of the darkest sand grain second is one with the indivisible void,
or the illusion of transcendental timelessness, where the center becomes the
conference, but I feel this book gains power if you read it in December (or in
June for Australian readers).

To “brace” for winter, to be forced to breathe in cold air
and see your breath…..It’s an “uphill” struggle, a descent into darkness, a
crisis poem, trying not to merely wait, trying not to cling so tight as to
strangle the gift. As the winter solstice approaches, one may be more likely to
feel “time’s defiant passing.” Scared of the dark and the cold, the
Anglo-Americans debate is it better to hope for spring, have a “mind of winter”
(they say NYC’s tough, well, I’m tough!), give in and embrace the darkness
(even if you have to hibernate, turn yourself off---as opposed to over—to do
so)….and let desperation have its day, aware of the dangers of pure poetry,
while “skipping backwards through the hurricane” (15). Krysia Jopek fiercely
flirts with many of these survival strategies, and finds a few to be immortal
and free (though not without a wry gallows humor; perhaps that’s what she means
by [melanc]holy). For instance, I
could call Section IX an ode to the strength of fragility (pg. 17-18), and a
no-nonsense account of the terror of being abandoned like a clock by time (or
time by a clock), and the trauma of isolation (or is it the isolation of trauma?):

“Magnetized to the floor, the character cannot arise from
the death scene, forgotten by everyone else on stage. The audience already went
home and dig cathartic holes.” (18)

But such a thematic reading of Hourglass Studies can run the risk of reducing it to “those story
facts, dust of the empirical, collage spun into pastiche by emphatic critics
stripping the coda. Everything reified; go
home.” (2), and, more intimately, Jopek’s brilliantly condensed almost
aphoristic short numbered sections become like the sands in the hourglass, the
grains of sand Blake could see worlds in (like snowflakes, no two alike); many
of these poems use the language of measurement to evoke an unmeasurable world,
even as the contemporary socio-political world makes occasional appearances
(section III, pg. 5-6).

One of the greatest pleasures of this book is the severe (if
not necessarily stark) forms of intimate shape-shifting (“Impeccable” 23)
attention to turns of phrase that have the power to both slow down defiant time
as well as speed up the transitions (and become more like time than a statue),
while never losing its authority falling into “mere language play.” Reading it, I think of Tristan Tzara’s “the
wonder of the word; around its center the dream called ourselves,” relishing
Jopek’s ambivalence about whether “to be fully on-guard” (15) while still
letting the double-meaning exceed logic’s grasp and compel hours of timeless
wonder.

Perhaps I could do better justice to this book by just
quoting some of these sections that especially grabbed my attention (I wonder
if I posted them on Facebook—out of context---if it would turn more people on
then this attempt at review)…

“Someone convinces we were needed in that house where sorrow
slips in on a Saturday, accordions the stairs.” (9)

“Wrists ache for a paintbrush to supersede the photograph.
Neck falls to confound interval, whispers to the knees to straighten and heal,
forget the long winter up ahead.” (12)

“Names can be changed, change can be given, wind can push
light objects through the street.” (13)

“Push me! The boy
orders the swing tangling verdant

[lush] decrescendo[s] [of] the marshland arching
from the

definitive.”

One of her most [dis][ch]arming devices is the use of
brackets that push the envelope of language’s ability to harbor multiple
meanings, perspectives and moods, which tend to get more complex as the book
progresses:

…..the hand[le] slips out of focus, displaces the
current…(7)

…the last day of vacation around the [is]land, different
each time…(7)

…Torrential downpour and thunder [deco]rate sleep to tell of
the [s]hip, the [t]rain, the waiting to be carried [a book] under someone’s
arm” (14)

“pass out pain[t] for everyone”

“Furiously night after night [p]urging emotions.”

“The goodbye proven with [photo]graphs, waiting for the roof
to heal, undo the laces, finish the prop[hecy], so there could be surprise
again without the ego’s shallow
pit[fall].” (19)

“The notebook [of winter] fell from the wind[ow]. Everything
heavy when days are X-rayed by night, the chest falls back [in c]loud.” (20)

“Another comes to title the composition [Melanc]holy.”(20)

“The feet sting upon landing: memory [g]losses ambit[ion].
(20)

By the time we reach the final poem (section XII, as in
clocks have 12 hours, years have 12 months, etc), the eponymous word
“Hourglass” finally appears for the first time, even though there had been many
clocks: “The hourglass flipped the conversation over. How to end when one
doesn’t recognize the beginning?” The poem had begun with the desire (or is it
need?) to turn over hourglass, as if the hourglass is a passive device, but
here the hourglass is an active power, as if, like a clock, it has hands
afterall, though not rendering people—at least as characters-- superfluous. In the
process, many dualisms seem to resolve themselves (though not in a
once-and-for-all static way). “I wake and
remember I am [a] stranger.”…..Being what they seem,…..time again has
meaning” Or, even better:

The director’s arms rock the camera and eucalyptus

Drunkenly

And [time] becomes a [chara]acter”

(Is an “acter” a cross between an actor and an aster?) Being
and seeming, Jopek both is and isn’t saying time becomes a character, coming to
accept that time will always be defiant, but then again so will the hourglass.
The ending of this poem reminds me of the Rilkean sublime that mixes “beauty
and terror” (Duino Elegies) which in
a way enacts the hourglass turned back to the poem’s beginning (with a Rilke
quote), while at the same time evoking the green of spring, as if writing this
poem got her through the winter….if you’re looking for a kind of happy ending
in which worry is transformed into wonder……either way, this book helps quicken
the mind, and may help prevent the onslaught of Alzheimer’s and other conditions
they say we’re prone to in the winter of our lives…..

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Perhaps the highest praise I can say about Sandra Simonds’ Further Problems With Pleasure (Univ. of
Akron Press, 2017) is that it gains deeper resonance on re-reading in ways that
can seduce me off of Facebook, get me off an ideological high horse (an
occupational hazard), and make me want to respond in kind rather than trying to
write a review that will inevitably water down the book’s intensities, and be
accused of mansplaining.

Assessing any book of poetry either involves moving from the
specific lines and poems to attempt some generalized summary words that could
characterize the overall feeling of “book” or taking a theme, and then picking
a line or stanza that allegedly illustrates it. Both ways have their pitfalls. Publisher’s Weekly is of little help,
with its reductive overemphasis on its Gothic elements, and its claim that Simonds
does nothing more than “reports the damage amid the ruins!” Perhaps, from the
cold eye of “reason” that’s true, but I find a transformative power in these
poem’s unfurling futurity that goes far beyond “profane observations competing
for attention with declarative assertions on the absurdities of love and
literature and 21st-century living.” I feel wisdom (for instance, “the absence of
sadness/ may create bitterness” 61). Other words (meant non-pejoratively) that
first come to my mind are: experienced, brilliant, warm, vibrant, alive,
present, intimate, generative, generous, passionate, anti-puritanical,
gender-bending, fun, chastising, resilient, workaholic, righteous,
conversational, self-mocking, romantic, theatrical and sublime equipment for
living…..AndI’m sure I’m missing better
ones, both denotatively and connotatively.

At least PW can acknowledge (albeit begrudgingly) that
Simonds’ “speakers self-govern even when the world grows murky or difficult,”
but, God, I hate this reviewers’ tone. He (I’m assuming it’s a he) makes it
sound like Romper Room or Mr. Rogers or something---not spousal abuse!

While many books of
poetry begin slowly with shorter poems, and tend to time-release some heavy
central themes (“their darkness”) that don’t become clearer, on first reading,
until enough details accrue maybe around page 30, Sandra Simonds’ Further
Problems With Pleasure jumps right in (in media res as it were),
with a 5 page (long-lined) poem to establish the ethos, logos, and pathos of a
speaker trying to extricate herself from an abusive relationship (without
revealing too many details):

“The one trick I’ve always
fallen back on is to make a man think/

he’s the
one rejecting me

But it was so quiet in
your room

even if
you had long books written by evil men…(1))

And despite, or
perhaps because of the title (as in the spirit of, let’s just indulge the urge
to say “Poetry Is Stupid And I Want To Die” ---or “This stuff is poison and
It’s Gonna Fuck Up My Shit”--and get it out of the way), the poetry may yet
have the power to get her out of this destructive relationship, even if she has
to identify with Keats’ urn, the bride and the mother, to do it.Imagination becomes a weapon and a survival
tool. To escape a situation, or to transform it? Does poetry have the ability
to make an abusive “partner” disappear? If inspiration can’t come, can you
force a sustained poetic trance state with hard work? This is a faith tested relentlessly
throughout……

We are also
introduced to her sinuous, capacious, long-lines, which afford her an ability
to navigate a wide range of moods and modes about as close to prose as you can
be and still be poetry---(and not, I must add, “barely poetry” for its
proximity to prose)…..On a technical level, her muscular lines remind me of a
device Marjorie Perloff loved in O’Hara’s poetry: “I know how to wash her
mellow hair glides like a swan.” Despite the conversational elegance (classy,
not gaudy) of Simonds styles and/or voices, she writes in “Poem For Joe,” that
“They said my poems/ were a mess” (31), and, indeed, many strict formalists,
minimalists or puritanical abstractionists may feel threatened by these poems,
but on repeated readings, it becomes clearer that even the most seemingly meandering
and flowing poems have a well-crafted structure in which words and themes that
may have gotten lost in the fierce devotion to the present circle back with a
charming vengeance to shape the poem (trace, for instance, the “career” of the
word “mall” in “Fun Clothes: A Gothic”), digging her way out of the strictures
of her detractors while finding joy in “the plasma of subjectivity revolving
like a ballerina.” (12)

++++++++++++

The Title “Fun
Clothes: A Gothic” (another maximalist long poem) itself suggests the cosmic,
and emotional, balance Simonds’ collection achieves. On one level, it could be
usefully compared to Anne Boyer’s recent Garment Against Women (or Cydney
Chadwick’s earlier Enemy Clothing) in its elastic feminist
performativity that positions itself in relation to the omnipresent hetero male
gaze, but this theme is also about embodiment in general, as the poem begins
rather abstractly, with no body but the (sublime, and/or repressed) physicality
of language:

“Schizophrenia like
suds in the afternoon, bubbles and bubbles of the glorious

prism, molds of
forensic happenings, and you speak softly in a delectable armory,

in feathers,

bursts, bras not
afraid of being impoverished, afraid, alas, that this disguise will

morph

to human flesh, the
underneath in chains that vibrate the invisible soundscape

of deposits, a debt
the color of frog skin, how can he hold back the incredible lush

The PW review
claims there’s a “frequent parallel between bodily want and a kind of spiritual
crisis,” yet their use of the word “parallel” too easily accepts the terms of
mind/body dualism that this poem deconstructs, or transcends, as tenor and
vehicle switch places in her elaborate conceit that also considers (or
constructs) the body’s eroticized relationship to consumerism. On another,
overlapping, level, it invites the reader to consider the relationship between
reading and writing poetry to the trial and error of clothes (the “lyotard” in
this poem could recall O’Hara’s “tight pants”); what, after all, is Ovid’s Metamorphosis
but a series of elaborate costume changes, and, in Simonds, as in Ovid, it is
not necessarily the “self” that is changing costumes either. Yet, other times
it is, as the poem can also be seen as a psychedelic muse poem in which the
speaker is not only conjuring a muse, but also considering what it is to be a
muse against the backdrop of a patriarchal Euro-poetry tradition in which women
are more mused than allowed to muse.

If there’s any
possibility juice left in the muse tradition, Simonds milks it for all its
worth. The muse tradition becomes especially reinvented in the polyvocal,
gender bending “Baudelaire Variations” that spatially occupy the book’s
“center.” The “Baudelaire Variations” show that Simonds excels in the shorter,
tighter, lyric as much as the longer expansive poems that frame it, and appeals
to the suggestive intelligence in many ways. One could say that intimately
engaging the 19th Century French “decadent” symbolist affords her
access to the seediest sides

of the canonical
male (art) psyche that has so often colonized women: how does a 21st
century woman respond to, appropriate, and reinvent that (alien) male
tradition? In this, these poems could be great fodder for college
comparison-contrast literary analysis papers (like Tyehimba Jess’ recent
critical appropriations of Berryman’s Dream Songs).

In “The Sick Muse,”
for instance, it might seem we could assume the speaker is Simonds herself,
invoking (and talking back to) Baudelaire as her muse:

“I can’t succumb
to you so quickly, but all my verse

pours so easily into the
rose love of your urns.

I could try to
hide it, but the depth is despotic,

and all
I really care to do is float on your rhythmic waves” (56)

This kinda reminds
me of that D.H. Lawrence poem where he expresses how ridiculous Shakespeare’s
themes, plots, and characters are, but how he’s nevertheless drawn to it
because of the beauty of the language. Yet it’s also possible that Simonds is
not merely criticizing Baudelaire’s emotional extravagances, but to some extent
identifying with them in a way that would be difficult to do as a seemingly
transparent authentic “I;” who, or what, is saying “I have hurt myself so I
become dangerous” and “I wrote you the most brutal love poem love knows” (64)?
Or is it a “saying it to keep it from happening” (as Ashbery would put it) kind
of catharsis strategy that Simonds is after?

and
murmuring and eventually I want that blood to hit the little rocks

of your
testicles below my wet mouth.” (53)

Yet, this poem ends
with a deeper longing: “I want you to open/ your eyes, every fucking night, to
this new century.” And, reading her, she makes me feel like there’s a reason
to, that, despite the ruins PW says she reports from, Simonds’ poetry is not
only a rewrite of Baudelaire, but an improvement over it, a forward-looking
beacon amid this “terrible century” (66) and decadent-izing world.

And though
“death is never far away” in this collection, neither is love, whether for
poetry, language, life, her children, or her fiancé, as in “Poem For Alex” near
the end of the book (as if, in a way, for the narratively inclined, the book
indeed has the much coveted “happy ending”):

You don’t have to be mysterious

Or buoyant like we were so young but

Now accustomed to manipulating language

The world becomes sweet, malleable and oh look

,,,,,there’s the Minoan snake goddess now

with her ancient explosive powers.”

Perhaps she needed to pass through the violent
conflagrations of the love expressed in “The Baudelaire Variations” to achieve
the beautiful transformative simplicity of the later poems in this collection.
Yet, throughout this book, it is not simply erotic love, nor even self-love
(self-as-possibility, possibility-as-self), but a general love for humanity and
experience, for instance in “Elysian Fields” she writes, “I’m…not the type to
give up/ on other people or the eventual occasions/ for new disasters” (78).

Not that she doesn’t have ample reason to want to give up,
especially on the male ideologues and utopian activists that make cameos in
this book:

“It’s free love until

you have to
wipe

a baby’s ass,” my friend says

at dinner talking
about

the possibilities

of a free

love commune.” (22)

Or:

“You learned how to spell me in school terrible

You need to mark
every place Faulkner was racist

And rewrite the
novel as erasure.” (27)

It’s not that she doesn’t agree that Faulkner was a racist,
and hasn’t herself fought on the front-lines of the anti-racist struggle, but,
for Simonds, the obsession with “honor” (in “Spring Dirge” 2) and political
self-righteousness can get in the way of, and tyrannize, the transformative powers
of poetry. Sure, she explores some deeply political issues in this piece---for
instance, how the technocracy can devalue poems, how Social Media is hostile to
the more contemplative mode (pg. 76), and the personal can be called political
here, but more importantly is the intimate possibility that can potentially
speak beyond (or at least between) partisanships---for though Simonds is a
poet’s poet in the best sense of the word, it does not come at the expense of
an ability to reach a more general reader (she’s not so busy being a poet’s
poet that she forgets to be a poet).

Aware that “defending/ pleasure kills it” (90), despair can
be a pep-talk (96), throughout this collection Simonds’ employs many
imaginative avatars (from the comet in “A Lover’s Discourse” to the nuns in
“Our Lady Of Perpetual Help), as well the “via negativa” (the negation of the
negation, as well as “negative capability”) to embrace those (people and moods)
outcast by society, and find a new beginning in a world in which “wellness”
often means “hellness” and reading too much of Blake’s Songs of Innocence may have the power to give you pneumonia (pg.
75, suggesting that the only way to cure the physical illness is to speak with
the “wry, disabused” voice of experience that cannot resign to a life of decay
and decline, as Jolie Holland would put it, or use loss as an excuse to close
off from the world): As Simonds puts it in “The Elysian Fields”

Which ancient philosopher thinks that life is

a rehearsal for death?

Or is that something from
bullshit New Age

mysticism I read at

the hippie
crystal shop I love? The suicides reverse it—

They think that death is a rehearsal

for flowers---specifically

the night
blooming ones. (81)

Further Problems With
Pleasure, in giving ample room for both voices, and realizing you can’t
choose life without choosing death, suggests a more balanced approach that may
yet help reground the world’s “ailing infrastructure.” It certainly has renewed
my faith in the possibilities of poetry as few books have. ++++++Chris Stroffolino

[1]The theme of
embodiment also occurs in the title poem, in which she takes a Chris Nealon
quote as a starting place (“Sometimes I wonder what the novel would have
looked/ like if instead of plots its characters had bodies”); Simonds writes:

About Me

7 books of poetry, including Stealer's
Wheel (Hard Press, 1999) and Light As A Fetter (The Argotist UK, 2007). My critical study (with David Rosenthal) of Shakespeare's 12th Night (IDG books)
was published in 2001; more recent prose writings of contemporary media studies
and ethnomusicology have appeared on-line @ Radio Survivor
(http://radiosurvivor.com/2011/06/02/a-history-of-radio-and-content-part-ii-jukeboxes-to-top-40/)
and The Newark Review
(http://web.njit.edu/~newrev/3.0/stroffolino1.html). A recipient of grants from
NYFA & The Fund For Poetry, Stroffolino was Distinguished Poet-in-Residence
at Saint Mary's College from 2001-06, and has since taught at SFAI and Laney
College. As a session musician, Stroffolino worked with Silver Jews, King Khan
& Gris Gris and many others. Always interested in the intersections between
poetry and music, he organized a tribute to Anne Sexton's rock band for The
Poetry Society of America, and joined Greg Ashley to perform the entire Death
Of A Ladies' Man album for Sylvie Simmons' Leonard Cohen biography in 2012.
In 2009, he released, Single-Sided Doubles, an album featuring poems set to
music. In 2016, Boog City published a play:AnTi-GeNtRiFiCaTiOn WaR dRuM rAdIo. Stroffolino currently teaches creative writing and critical thinking at Laney College